esafacts.org

Two recently published meta-analyses offer two different anwers to the question about help or harm. The reality is that ESAs do both–they help some patients and they harm others. In some cases they may both help and harm the same patient.

Meta-analyses are helpful in gaining a broad overview of the evidence, but they have limitations. One important limitation is the fact that the conclusions suggested by any given meta-analysis can be significantly influenced by which studies are included and which are left out.

Read the plain language summary of the Cochrane Collaboration meta-analysis of drugs used to treat cancer-related anemia at the following link. This study concludes that ESAs provide a quality of life benefit to cancer patients.  http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab006704.html

A meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association concludes that ESAs are harmful to cancer patients. Read a summary of that analysis here: http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/299/8/914.

By the way, given the public health importance of both of these studies, it would be nice to make the full text available to the public at no charge. Perhaps both organizations are willing to grant us permission to do so. If we receive the green light, we will be glad to provide a link to the full text or enable downloading of the PDFs we have of these papers.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.